On the Beach, a Brand New Life

By JEFF VANDAM

Published: February 13, 2005

Correction Appended

MARISOL GUIVAS met her husband-to-be one day in 1998 through an instant message. She lived in the Bronx, he in Brooklyn, and she asked his name. It was Angel, he said, and like his future wife, he had a keen interest in the heavenly figures that were his namesake. One of their first dates was to see the Internet love story ''You've Got Mail.'' They seemed destined for each other.

Marisol and Angel were married in 2000. They lived in the $32,000 one-bedroom co-op that Angel had bought as a bachelor in Sheepshead Bay. He had grown up there, the only Puerto Rican kid in a neighborhood of Italians, and now he and Marisol were starting their family there. Their son, Gabriel, was born in June 2002, and as he grew out of his crib and into his big-boy bed, the co-op began to feel too small.

They looked north, to new construction under way in Harlem, and east, to homes in Long Island. Then an item in the newspaper caught Marisol's eye. It mentioned a lottery for brand new seaside homes in a complex to be named Arverne-by-the-Sea, in Queens. It was a 20-block stretch in the distant Rockaways, the string-bean-shaped peninsula that juts into the ocean south of Kennedy Airport and Jamaica Bay. It was only 10 minutes from Angel's job at the post office in Howard Beach, and would become a vast development of homes, with stores, restaurants, a Y.M.C.A., a marina and a school. They signed up.

Last February, they got a call that they were in line for the very last house in the very first phase of Arverne-by-the-Sea, 32 homes labeled the Sands at Harbour Pointe. They went to the sales office and poked around the neighborhood, if it could have been called that. There were no food stores, save for a bodega. The subway station was a treacherous 15-minute trek away on the sidewalk-less Rockaway Freeway. Still, when two buyers in front of them bailed out, Marisol and Angel scraped together a 10 percent down payment on the $395,000 price. Their new address was on Arverne Mews, a street that did not yet exist.

The land where the Guivases were about to put down new roots had been nothing but sand, weeds and trash for 40 years. It wasas though a real estate curse had befallenit. More wild dogs than people on the streets. More trash than shells on the beach. The end of New York, literally and figuratively. It had been fallow, empty, abandoned, its beachside bungalows razed in the 1960's to make way for decades of schemes that never materialized. It was part of the 308-acre Arverne Urban Renewal Area, left over long after the idea of flattening a dense patch of residential land was rejected as an urban planning concept. The biggest vacant lot in the city.

But Arverne-by-the-Sea was to change all that. The free sand buckets and shovels from the sales office depicted people on the beach waving in front of a brilliant sunset. The ambitious master plan was to build 117 acres of residential subdivisions with names like Ocean Breeze, the Tides and the Dunes. The grand total of market-rate homes to be built by 2007 was 2,300. Marisol and Angel were taking a grand gamble on a place where no previous project had come to fruition in nearly half a century.

Land of 1,000 Schemes

To stroll on the shores of Arverne these days is to experience loneliness. Among the bare parcels that were once filled with houses and people, there is very nearly nothing. The only buildings are a closed bait-and-tackle outlet and a health clinic. A small ''Comfort Station'' sits on the boardwalk just off Beach 73rd Street; a weathered sign above the boarded-up restrooms says they are ''temporarily closed.''

The emptiness invites routine illegal dumping, and in 2001, two joggers, including a 74-year-old man, were attacked on the boardwalk by wild dogs. The skyline is composed of the elevated tracks of the A train and the towers of nearby housing projects. Manhattan, occasionally visible in the distance from Beach Channel Drive, seems impossibly far away, sunken into the sea.

Arverne was not always devastated. In the early 20th century, it was a well-to-do resort community containing one of the nation's largest hotels, the Arverne. Aristocrats gamboled in the sea spray.

''It was a vacation area with bungalows and houses and concessions along the boardwalk,'' said Jonathan Gaska, district manager for Community Board 14. ''It really mirrored what the old Coney Island was.''

By the 1940's, Arverne had become a bustling neighborhood. Yet the prosperity that bolstered other parts of the country in the 50's did not seep into that part of the Rockaways. Stores, theaters and restaurants fled, and Arverne declined to the point where the city razed its crumbling homes and labeled it an ''urban renewal area'' in 1964. But nothing was ever renewed.

This is not to say people haven't tried. In the years before Angel and Marisol Guivas set foot in Arverne, developers and community leaders brought forth a cavalcade of ideas, some more preposterous than others. Few of them took into account the wishes of the surrounding community.

Correction: March 13, 2005, Sunday
A chart on Feb. 13 with an article about new housing in the Rockaways misstated the year the first structure was built on the Rockaway Peninsula. It was not 1856; an early settler, Richard Cornell, built a home in Far Rockaway in 1690.